The Association for Behavior Analysis International® (ABAI) is a nonprofit membership organization with the mission to contribute to the well-being of society by developing, enhancing, and supporting the growth and vitality of the science of behavior analysis through research, education, and practice.

VictorLaties

Victor G. Laties

University of Rochester

Dr. Victor Laties won the Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis Award from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis (SABA) in 1995 and 2003-the only person to win this award twice. He was a major figure in the development of both behavioral pharmacology and behavioral toxicology. His work with the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (SEAB) journals has been essential to their development and their sustained excellence over the last forty years. In recent years his contributions to developing, maintaining, and updating the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior/Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis website has been invaluable

Dr. Laties received his BA from Tufts and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. A postdoctoral year at Brown with Harold Schlosberg and Carl Pfaffmann introduced him to behavior analysis. A transforming event was helping to run two undergraduate rat labs with Rosemary Pierrel. These were based upon Keller and Schoenfeld's Columbia model. He learned about operant conditioning with his students as together they read Principles of Psychology.

His first job was at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and it was there, in the Departments of Medicine and Pharmacology, that he started doing animal research, learning much from Bernie Weiss, a fellow Rochester graduate who had joined him at Johns Hopkins. They ranged widely, studying pain measurement, heat reinforcement, human observing behavior, and various other types of schedule and stimulus control, usually, but not always, with an eye to usefulness in understanding the actions of behaviorally important drugs. After moving together to Rochester's medical school in 1965, they expanded their interests to behavioral toxicology; however, Laties continued to emphasize behavioral pharmacologic questions in his research.

Laties became secretary-treasurer of SEAB and executive editor of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB) in 1966. He had no idea then that the commitment was to be open-ended. With no one else showing any interest in the job, he has been heavily involved in journal business affairs ever since, enjoying every minute, and he also edited JEAB for four years in the mid-1970s. He retired in 1993 but remains actively engaged in managing the web pages for the SEAB journals as well as taking care of his own department's website.